National and International

SOCIAL STUDIES 449 embrace" means coition without insemination, and for the moral theologian this is an "incomplete venereal act" whose permissibility has to be debated. The author's pastoral concern is evident, but the logic of these Latin moralists whose opinions he so carefully arrays is vitiated by two things: the non-citation of female opinion, and the assumption that writers who have no experience of marriage are entitled to pronounce upon what is proper in the sexual relations of man and wife. A learned and useless book. (E. C. BLACKMAN) SOCIAL STUDIES NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL Alexander Brady The richest vein in the social studies of the current year is political biography. Six books deal with prominent Canadian public figures, including three former Prime Ministers. Entitled to pride of place is Brawn of the Globe by ]. M. S. Careless ( Macmillan of Canada, pp. ix, 406, illus., $7.50): the second and concluding study On this theme by the author. A former volume had traced Brown's career from a Scottish boyhood to the leadership of the Reform or Liberal party in Upper Canada during the 1850's. In the present book seven chapters discuss Brown's relation to the critical events of the 1860's culminating in Confederation , and the remaining three complete the story of his life. This valuable addition to the history of Confederation is packed with significant details and telling quotations on the Charlottetown and Quebec Conferences, the debates among Canadian ministers, the negotiations in London, the attitudes of the British Government, and the efforts to achieve a favourable response from the general public to the federal plan. Illuminating are the comments from the private correspondence discovered by the author in a trunk in the Scottish home of Brown's daughter-in-law and grandson. Such fresh and bountiful documentation makes possible a more complete account than hitherto of Brown's distinguished part in the political negotiations that resulted in the coalition of 1864. It was Brown, as the author conVincingly illustrates, who led in the advocacy of federation as a means to eliminate the sectional antagonIf .This two-volume study received the 1963 Governor-General's Award for Non-Fiction. For a review of Volume I, see Alexander Brady, "Social Studies," UTQ XXIX, p. 503 (July, 1960) . 450 LETTERS IN CANADA: 1963 ism in the Canadas and to secure western expansion. He envisaged federal union at a time when that skilful political in-fighter, John A. Macdonald, was "still engrossed in the barren politics of the existing union, still totting up votes to devise another of its endless, empty ministerial combinations." Not merely does Mr. Careless aptly show how Brown initiated the federal solution, he casts flashes of light on the high courage and effective action of Cartier, who had to overcome in Lower Canada formidable resistance to any change in the existing union and who flung his weight behind a federation of all the colonies rather than merely the two Canadas. Cartier and Brown made the coalition and hence federation possible, and in doing so mortgaged their futures. Although this is primarily a political biography, illuminating many facets of the party situation before Confederation, it also provides a fresh and very agreeable view of Brown's personality. Those who know him only from his solemn and dour argumentation in the Globe will derive delight from the charm and light humour of the letters to his wife Ann. Brown accomplished something uncommon: he managed to combine in love letters a perceptive analysis of current political events. T wo formidable rivals in Canada's politics between the wars were Mackenzie King and Arthur Meighen. Both are the subjects of biographies in the current year. H. Blair Neatby in William Lyon Mackenzie King II, The Lonely Heights, 1924-1932 ( University of Toronto Press, pp. xii, 452, $7.95) has written the second volume of an official life, official in the sense that it was commissioned by King's literary executors and in part based on manuscripts, especially King's immense Diary, not accessible to other scholars. All such works have an obvious handicap. A reader is likely often to wonder how far the evidence on which the interpretation...